At least five killed and 20 wounded on popular Istiklal street, a major thoroughfare in the Turkish city’s centre.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the bombing [Reuters]

An explosion believed to have been caused by a suicide bomber has hit the popular Istiklal Street in central Istanbul’s Taksim square area.

Government officials said at least five people were killed and 36 were injured – seven seriously – in Saturday morning’s explosion.

The suspected suicide bomber is believed to be among those killed. Twelve foreign citizens were among the wounded, including an unknown number of Israelis.

Footage from the scene showed police and emergency services cordoning off the street, which has been completely cleared of people.

Witnesses told Al Jazeera that hundreds of people ran in panic away from the site of the explosion, moments after the incident.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

Istiklal street is a long pedestrian thoroughfare that winds its way through the Beyoglu neighbourhood from Taksim Square.

It is rimmed by hundreds of shops and would have been filled with pedestrians at the time of the explosion.

Al Jazeera’s Jamal Elshayyal said the location of the explosion was the equivalent of a bomb going off in Oxford St in London or Fifth Avenue in New York.

The explosion comes as Turkey is on edge following two recent suicide bomb attacks in the capital, Ankara, which were claimed by a Kurdish group, that is an off-shoot of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK.

Turkey has been fighting on multiple fronts. As part of a US-led coalition, it is battling the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, also known as ISIS), which has seized territory in neighbouring Syria and Iraq.

It is also battling the PKK in its southeast, where a two-and-a-half-year ceasefire collapsed last July, prompting the worst violence since the 1990s.

Turkey sees the unrest in its largely Kurdish southeast as deeply linked to events in northern Syria, where the Kurdish YPG militia has seized territory as it fights both ISIL and rebels battling President Bashar al-Assad.

ISIL has carried out at least four bomb attacks on Turkey since June 2015, including a suicide bombing which killed 10 German tourists in central Istanbul in January.

Turkish President Erdogan says “Syria-linked bomber” behind explosion which killed 10 at city’s Sultanahmet Square.

Police are conducting searches outside the cordoned-off area in case a second bomber is involved.

by Al Jazeera

At least 10 people have been killed in an explosion at central Istanbul’s historic Sultanahmet Square, the city governor’s office said.

The explosion occurred at about 10.20am local time on Tuesday morning, hitting an area popular with both tourists and locals. In a statement, the Istanbul governor’s office said 10 people were killed and 15 were injured.

Reuters reported that most of those who were killed were German tourists. Meanwhile, at least two of those injured were in “critical condition”.

“Investigations into the cause of the explosion, the type of explosion and perpetrator or perpetrators are under way,” the governor’s office said in a statement quoted by the Dogan news agency.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan confirmed that foreign tourists were among the casualties.

He said during a speech in Ankara that a Syria-linked suicide bomber was believed to be behind the blast.

“I strongly condemn the terror attack which was carried out by a suicide bomber of Syrian origin,” Erdogan said.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. But authorities confirmed that the suicide bomber is a 28-year-old Syrian national.

Turkey’s Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has convened an emergency security meeting of key ministers and officials.

Following the explosion, ambulances rushed to the site.

Police cordoned off the area to protect people against the possibility of a second explosion.

Al Jazeera’s Emre Rende, reporting from Istanbul, said information was scarce immediately after the blast.

“Witnesses have said that the blast was heard from other neighbourhoods,” he said. “Witnesses said that the ground shook.”

Rende said police were conducting searches outside the cordoned-off area in case a second bomber was involved.

Erdem Koroglu, who was working at a nearby office at the time of the explosion, told NTV television that he saw several people lying on the ground following the blast.

“It was difficult to say who was alive or dead,” Koroglu said. “Buildings rattled from the force of the explosion.”

The square sits next to the most popular tourist sites in the city, including the 6th century Greek Orthodox church, the centuries-old Sultan Ahmet mosque, also known as the Blue Mosque, and the Roman-era Basilica Cistern, an ancient underground water depot.

The blast comes just over a year after a female suicide bomber blew herself up at a police station for tourists off the same square, killing one officer and wounding another.

Turkey has become a target for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), with two bombings last year blamed on the armed group, in the town of Suruc near the Syrian border and in the capital Ankara. The latter killed more than 100 people.

Violence has also escalated in the mainly Kurdish southeast since a two-year ceasefire collapsed in July between the state and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) armed group, which has been fighting for three decades for Kurdish autonomy.